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Avatars... without slowing things down

I think enabling Avatars could really add some personalization to the forum, so that we aren't all just blank text. I know you were concerned about threat crapping if avatar-enabling was tied to the number of posts. How about tying it to the time you've been a member? Say, one week or month. You can limit the image resolution to be 100x100, and file type to jpeg. This eliminates distracting animated gifs, and keeps the file size low. Most jpegs that size are only 5k. Even the busiest threads have at most 10 different posters. That's only 50kB extra in the extreme case. That's only 25% more to download one time only since it'll be cached afterwards.

Note that I'm talking about avatars, not signatures. THAT could be distracting. Small static avatars are not. C'mon Kwun!! Give us what we want!

besides, what are you planning to put in the image? a picture of yourself?

Actually I had a look at hardwarezone forums (www.hardwarezone.com) where modious seems to hang out and they seem to use exactly the same software as BF (I wasn't looking all that closely so it might be a mildly different version) and they do use avatars. Whilst a few or them have cars, or their comps as avatars, most of the guys seem to have really pics of really cute Asians chicks (usually just the face). Now whilst this isn't a bad thing I can't say it'd really add much to our forums.

Re: Avatars... without slowing things down

Originally posted by bigredlemon I think enabling Avatars could really add some personalization to the forum, so that we aren't all just blank text. I know you were concerned about threat crapping if avatar-enabling was tied to the number of posts. How about tying it to the time you've been a member? Say, one week or month. You can limit the image resolution to be 100x100, and file type to jpeg. This eliminates distracting animated gifs, and keeps the file size low. Most jpegs that size are only 5k. Even the busiest threads have at most 10 different posters. That's only 50kB extra in the extreme case. That's only 25% more to download one time only since it'll be cached afterwards.

Note that I'm talking about avatars, not signatures. THAT could be distracting. Small static avatars are not. C'mon Kwun!! Give us what we want!

Lol. I can just imagine what will appear if avatars DO appear. lol. Pictures of racquets, shuttles, badminton players, and pictures of members. lol.